Digital advertising and marketing: only the best ideas worldwide, since 2003

eWeek presents an interview with Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president for the MSN personal services and business division who says that MSN will focus its efforts in delivery direct-marketing solutions and a new advertising platform.
According to Mehdi, “The online advertising market is now “clicking” and growing strongly”, while spam, intrusive advertising and pop-up ads were the major sources of user dissatisfaction with the Internet in 2003.”

Wendy M. Grossman, the author of Net.wars and online columist, has an interesting article today entitled: Viral marketing is dead: tell all your friends. She starts talking about a recent meeting run by IAB Uk, than she presents her opinions on online advertising and viral marketing.
Even though I don’t agree with everything she says, I believe it’s nice to hear different points of view.

Interactivity will not kill tv advertising, on the contrary, it will help it. Basically this is the message by John Battelle in his recent article on Business 2.0 concerning Honda television commercial “Cog” which created an online viral buzz.

As Revolution Magazine reports today, Virgin Atlantic is starting a new campaign to target premium travellers, in its competition game with British Airways. It will invest about �50m to relaunch it Upper Class Suite. The campaign will be run through direct mailing as well as through email marketing, brochures and a microsite. The creative agency for this campaign is (of course Smart, which I suppose is an Australian agency…

A new research by DoubleClick, reported today on MediaPost suggests that rich media usage continues to grow quarter by quarter, while larger ads have surpassed the smaller options in popularity.
The article is pretty good because it’s filled with interesting numbers on the diffusion of different online ads formats.
Large formats are getting more and more popular: for example, the leaderboard, a wide unit (728 x 90) that often appears at the top of web pages, is now the fastest growing size at 562% growth from Q2 2002, and is now the fourth most common size served by DoubleClick. Half-page ads (550 x 480) had the second highest response rate at .90%.

In today’s Digital Bulletin you can learn more about Sony’s recent campaign aimed to raise awareness of portable devices such as MD and CD Walkman. The campaing with the brand message “You make it a Sony” will run online but also through music festivals and other music channels all across Europe.
The viral buzz will be spread by Cake Group, which has a very original Web site I reccomend to visit (even though I’m not sure that I like it . Pay attention to the “hot cakes” part… it can make you sick…

… has been explained by Ken Yamada on Information Week. Webcast technology is being used to run meetings, to communicate with employees, train sales forces, make product announcements, brief investors and analysts, and run corporate seminars, among other uses.
The article is very good and detailed and provides with a lot of useful information about web casting technology, costs and effectiveness.

Yahoo! Consumer Direct Powered by ACNielsen that’s the (long) name of the new service targeting packaged-goods marketers that tries to answer a longstanding question of many advertisers: Do online ads spur offline sales?
Well, this is actually the question asked by AdWeek in an article appearing on Yahoo! News Advertising.

This is not exactly about online advertising, anyway I think it’s somehow connected since it the discussion is on PDF files used for online presentations. The usability guru Jakob Nielsen talks about the matter in his Alertbox, suggesting that:

Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that’s it. Don’t use it for online presentation.”
File under:acrobat, online presentations, pdf, usability